Gillingham manager Mark Bonner knows what the club wants but isn’t looking into the future.
The Gills take on Carlisle United at home on Saturday as they kick off their League 2 season – one which they hope will end in promotion.
Chairman Brad Galinson sanctioned a change of manager after last season’s mid-table finish under Stephen Clemence and hasn’t hidden his impatience to get out of the EFL’s bottom tier.
For new boss Bonner, it’s a process that will take time.
He said: “(The owner) told me on day one what he wants to do and he’s told the world on social media. You can’t put that back in a drawer and hide it away from it.
“This club wants to get promoted, it has been at the level above and has the ambition and the potential to do it, no problem with that at all. It’s why I came here.
“We all want the same thing. The distance between doing it and where we are now is miles.
“There are a lot of teams who want to do it, a lot of teams who have played at a higher level, a lot of managers who have managed a higher level, a lot of players who have played a higher level that are all after the same thing.
“It is nonsense talking about it now. We have to see where we are in 10 games and then crack on from there.
“Everyone starts Saturday on zero. If you get promoted you probably need 90 points, 30 wins out of 46, that is miles away. Don’t think about it – too big a number, too far ahead.
“Win the next game and if you don’t, get on with it and try and win the next one. That is all you will get from me. I will be so boring, I don’t get excited by winning, I don’t get that depressed by losing, it is just part of football and we will just try and win the next game of football every time we play.”
Mr Galinson wants good football too, something Bonner hopes his team can deliver, but knows over the course of the season it won’t always happen.
He said: “We will play in a way that hopefully gets people excited.
“We are going to try and out-score teams, but we know on any given day that if some players aren’t available or are off it a bit we will have to win in different ways.
“We want to be a team that people love watching and love playing in and if we can become that then we’re winning and the results will take care of themselves.
“We do analysis every day, the boys work their socks off on the training ground and in the gym, we are trying to build a good team but we have a lot of things to do and a lot of work to do to become that team.
“We shouldn’t think we’re a good team because we are only just starting a process of becoming one. We were a mid-table team last year that couldn’t score goals.
“If anyone thinks that we’ve all of a sudden catapulted to some new level then they are way off it. We have got miles of work to do.
“We have 46 games and to be a team at the top you have to win a hell of a lot of football matches and you need to be exceptional.
“Right now probably more than half the league think it can be their season. You can look at odds, disagree with loads, see pundits’ predictions but it is all nonsense to us, it doesn’t matter.
“We have to be good but first we have to be the best version of ourselves and keep getting better.
“We know what we want to do, we just don’t expect to do it. We have to earn if and we have to be brilliant if we are going to do it.
“Half the time I don’t know where the expectation comes from, history usually tells you whether you should expect that or not. History tells me we shouldn’t expect it. Our ambition says we should. We have a big space between those two things.”
Bonner’s won promotion before in League 2 at Cambridge United and was reminded of that in his pre-match press conference, but replied: “There are 12 managers in the league that have done it before, quite a few have done it a lot more times than I have. If that was the prerequisite and it was that simple that would be great.
“There is no magic formula here. Blood and guts, work ethic, getting through tough times, winning games ugly, there are so many things you have to do.
“It is so simple to say what could happen and what we want to happen but it is ridiculous before the season starts to say we are going to do x, y and z.
“Everyone wants to do the same thing, to be fighting at the top end of the table, but there are a lot of teams who want to do it and it will be a super open and inconsistent league, always has been, this league will be no different.
“We need to be a consistent team within it and we have to find runs of games where we can win them.
“The start for me is the first 10-12 games and we have to see where we are in that period.”
Bonner sees the first match against Carlisle as a decent starting point to judge his team.
United finished bottom of League 1 last year but like the Gills, they have ambitious US-based owners who are seeking bigger levels and look to have recruited well in the summer.
Bonner said: “It’s the first marker of the season to see where we are in comparison to a team who are going to be well-fancied, and they should be, because of the level they played at last year and the business they have done in the summer.
“We want to be considered as one of the good teams as well.
“It is a nice marker on day one to see where we stand, what’s the work been like so far, what does well and what doesn’t and what do we need to polish up on and work on.
“The process of this team improving will be a few months long. We are six weeks in and we are in an okay place but we only have ourselves to judge against at the moment because of the games we’ve played.
“It will be nice to start the competition. You get to a point in pre-season where you want to for play real and all that brings. The atmosphere will be great.
“I am looking forward to it mattering and feeling the atmosphere of a proper game and I hope that everyone is very supportive of the team and I expect they will be from start to finish.”
